Luca shrugged. “The premiers in Tasmania and South Australia are also asking the prime minister to let them stay, so we’ll see what he has to say. . . .”

Pop gathered some of the mail that was spread at the end of the table, and then he pushed a stack over to me. “Here, Fred—if you’re going to sit, you’re going to help. Look for any addressed to me and sort them into one pile, would you?” Luca patted my back and urged me to take a seat at the table.

We worked quietly, just the sound of rustling paper as my mind ticked over deadlines and rubble houses. I came across a heavy little booklet—all glossy and wrapped in plastic, with an illustration of a village on the front cover and Pop’s name stickered on the outside.

“What’s the Oliver’s Hill Retirement Village?” I asked, reading the swirly title.

Pop looked up and then away quickly when he saw what I was holding. Luca frowned while he stared at the booklet.

“Jeff . . . ?” Luca started to ask, pausing his jabbing at the calculator to turn to Pop, who shrugged in response.

“Look, I don’t know—you turn seventy and suddenly you’re on all these nuisance mailing lists. . . .” he huffed. “Just chuck it, Fred—straight in the trash.”

I turned the booklet back around. “Can’t I open it?”

Pop shrugged again. “No skin off my nose.”

I started flipping through the glossy pages, looking at line drawings and colorful images of triangle-roofed houses all in a row. There were no photos, just sketches and illustrations.

“I don’t get it—what is this place? Is it real?”

Luca paused his calculating again to wave at me to pass him the booklet.

“Looks like it’s not built yet,” he said, flipping through the pages. “But they’re taking offers from those who want to move in from the year 2001 onwards. . . .” Luca frowned down at what he was reading.

“But it’s not an actual, real place yet on a map? That you can go and visit?” I asked again.

“Yes, it’s a real place—a village, they call it,” Pop said.

“But it’s not a real village.”

“It’s a community, Fred—that’s the point,” Pop sighed. And then he waved his hand in the air, pointing somewhere behind him. “Gonna be out Frankston way.”

“I thought you were just on the nuisance mailing list?” Luca said suddenly, making me look up at him and frown. “It sounds like you’ve studied up on this place?”

Frankston was two hours away by bus. It was the closest thing to a city that we had on the Mornington Peninsula, before heading into the real thing in Melbourne. Why would Pop want to move to a place that didn’t even exist yet, but would be farther away from us than the RRC was?